The MH17 plane crash made waves on Wikipedia after an IP address reportedly belonging to the Russian government edited a Wikipedia entry related to the airliner.

The entry on the Russian-language version of Wikipedia was changed by someone using an IP address belonging to VGTRK, a television and radio network run by the Russian government.

The edit was caught by the Twitterbot @RuGovEdits. Launched last week, the account sends out a notification whenever it detects edits to Wikipedia pages made by people using Russian government IP addresses.

The changes were made to a site listing civil aviation accidents, including MH17. According to the news site Global Voices, the original text said MH17 was shot down "by terrorists of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic with Buk system missiles, which the terrorists received from the Russian Federation," and was posted by a Wikipedia user with an IP address in Kiev. The text was replaced to say that "The plane was shot down by Ukrainian soldiers.”

People are blowing this out of proportion. One over-eager official edits wikipedia and suddenly it is "Russian goverment omg omg omg wtf!"Apostrophe

"Someone at the Kremlin edited wikipedia" is the latest proof Russia shot down a plane.Veridis Quo

If Russia wanted to run a disinfo psyop I think they would do a better job than simply editing a Wikipedia page using bad opsec. Seriously.PIRATES

On the social media forum Reddit, one user emphasised the edit could have been made by anyone at the television company.

The tweet actually says that Wiki's article has been edited by VGTRK which is a television company.
Jeez. VGTRK has thousands of employes, the ordinary people, who can edit Wiki from their work PC-s, any of them could do that. But telegraph decided to make an article out of nothing.kapyctnik

This is not the first time that edits have come from Russian government IP addresses. Using data from Wikimedia, Norwegian programmer Jari Bakken found that Russian government IP addresses made anonymous edits to ru.wikipedia.org 6,909 times over the last 10 years. The changes range from critiques of the United States to minor changes in video game plots.